something
going on.

The dealer declared that the two birds would thrive best in the same
cage; so I introduced Koma into Taka's commodious abode that afternoon
and listened in high content to their jubilant bursts of song. They
went to sleep on the highest perch with their tiny bodies cuddled close
together, but during the following week their love lyric was punctuated
by several fights. Taka, hitherto so contemptuous of the comforts of
his cage, now wanted to swing whenever he saw Koma swinging and
insisted on shoving his guest away and eating from the very seed-cup
that Koma had selected, whereupon Koma, a glistening ruffle of wrath,
would fling himself in furious attack upon his honorable ancestor.

Mary, whose partiality for Koma, little beauty that he was, attempted
no disguise, maintained that Taka always began the combats and was
always worsted; but I was not so sure. Koma, a restless gleam of chirp
and song, was such a violent character that twice he rammed his head
between the upper wires of his cage and nearly hanged himself. Some
heathen deity had given him, for his protection, a tremendous voice,
and his shrieks soon brought me running to his rescue. Both times, as
soon as I had parted the wire and released the lustrous little head,
Taka, wildly agitated through the minutes of Koma's peril, turned
fiercely upon me and accused me of the trap.

"_You_ did it! Ugly thing! _You_ did it! You nearly killed my Koma."

And poor little Koma, gasping in the gravel, would chime in faintly but
with no less resentment, "_She_ did it."

Yet within an hour they might be fighting again, and I would find them
spent and panting, glaring at one another from opposite sides of their
limited arena, with deep cuts about the little warrior faces.

"Taka," I would remonstrate, "aren't you ashamed to treat your own
clansman like this, when you wanted him so much?"

But Taka and penitence were far asunder. "It's my last
tail-feather--chir-r-r! Koma, he hasn't any tail at all--chir-r-r! No
more have I now. Don't care a grub. I pulled _his_ out. Catch me that
fly, can't you? Who-oo-oo-oop!"

Koma, whose song had an entrancing gypsy note, was so much the wilder
of the two that Taka seemed comparatively tame. Koma's terror of human
monsters was unconquerable, and his panics, whenever one of us neared
the cage, soon destroyed the frail confidence that our long patience
had been building up in Taka. Presently we had two out-and-ou